Poet Karren LaLonde Alenier as author of The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas continues with her operatic proclivities as she launched her latest poetry collection The Anima of Paul Bowles in Los Angeles in 2016. Amy King saaid, Anima “makes a lyrical dive into the historical corpus of two major 2oth-century writer/artists.” More info: karren@alenier.com.

Adsforblog

Friday, April 19, 2013

BPR LIT TRIP 20 with Dan O’Brien

Man’s inhumanity to man, woman, humankind is something we
live with everyday but will never get used to. In today’s 20th Lit
Trip through the Birmingham Poetry Review volume 40, the Steiny Road Poet
looks at poet-playwright Dan O’Brien’s “The War Reporter Paul Watson on
the Examination of Women.” It is one of two poems from the point of view of
Canadian journalist Paul Watson, Canada’s only journalist who has won a Pulitzer Prize.
The Steiny Poet strongly believes these two poems are related to O’Brien’s
award-winning play The Body of an
American. OK, yes, the Steiny Poet finds the following quote from O’Brienon on The Missouri Review’s website
where they have published another poem in O’Brien’s series on Watson:

The
purpose of my work with Paul has been to try to use poetry to bridge the
distance between an “average” person like myself, and someone who has witnessed
some of the signal atrocities of our era, in places as far-flung as Angola,
Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan (the list goes on). The poems are derived
from his memoir, Where War Lives, his journalism, recordings and transcripts
he has shared with me, and most valuably our emails and conversations. Some of
these poems take place in Ulukhaktok in the Canadian High Arctic, where I
visited Paul there in the winter of 2010 while he was enjoying a brief respite
from war reporting, covering the “Arctic and Aboriginal Beat” for the Toronto
Star. He’s now based mainly in Kandahar. Our peculiar collaboration has also
produced a play, The Body of an American, but after finishing the play I
found I couldn’t let his story go. In a very personal way, his voice continues
to haunt me.

In “Watson
on the Examination of Women,” an
eighteen-lined, single stanza poem that makes no attempt to be a heroic
sonnet—neither in rhyme scheme nor metrical count (iambic pentameter is the
traditional rule), O’Brien through the voice of his narrator Paul Watson
carves out the plight of a woman in a burqa deprived of a woman doctor and so she
bleeds to death. However, even when the women doctors are reinstated, the male
doctors, who are forced to stay behind closed doors, are in charge of the sick
women’s examinations. Watson reports that once he spoke with the poet Dr. Abdul Samay Hamed and Hamed said, “The Taliban is a mystery/ its Creator is unable
solve.”

What makes this a poem versus sudden fiction are lines like
“Cassettes/ get unspooled and strung from checkpoint towers/ festively like
intestines” and “female sick/ must of course remain at all times shrouded/ in
their burquas.” The simile of the recording tape compared to intestines and the
word choice shrouded cement the sick
women’s inhumane fate. The women’s medical treatment is barbaric and they are
the walking dead. Subtle internal near rhymes ebb and flow with such
combinations as cassettes/checkpoint, shoes/taboo, black/doctor, part/hurt. If
just the last word of every line is read, one gets the essence of this poem (a
sign of a good poem with strong line breaks). Here are the end words:
cassettes, towers, shoes, women, sick shrouded, reaches, part, eyes, prove,
naturally, doctors, blindly, hear, poet, said, mystery, solve.

Perhaps it is small consolation the last words O’Brien’s
poem come from a Afghan poet who indicates that Taliban behavior is even a
mystery to the Creator (the Steiny Poet believes one can substitute Allah) but Dr. Hamed was also a trained
as a physician and understands the plight of Afghan women whom he writes
compassionately about in his poetry. In repressive countries, only the poets dare
tell the truth and often at great risk to their own lives. Hats off to Dan O'Brien's brave work.

About the Poet

is author of seven collections of poetry, including Looking for Divine Transportation (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press), winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature, and her latest, The Anima of Paul Bowles from MadHat Press. Her poetry and fiction have been published in such magazines as: the Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Poet Lore. Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her opera with composer William Banfield and Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes premiered at New York City’s Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia in June 2005. She writes a monthly column on opera for Scene4 Magazine at scene4.com.